The Professional Spine: Creation of a Four-Year Engineering Design and Practice Sequence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Professional Spine: Creation of a Four-year Engineering Design and Practice SequenceIncreasingly engineering educators see value in establishing a connected sequence of experiencesthat focus on engineering design and practice in undergraduate engineering programs. Notablereports on the future of engineering education conclude that students should be provided anopportunity to integrate knowledge and skills in activities of increasing complexity that emulateengineering practice throughout their program (e.g. Sheppard, 2008; Crawley 2007).Experiences of this type exist in some programs but are relatively rare and often not published.Research at our institution and elsewhere has demonstrated a need for repeated involvement indesign activity for students to build competence and confidence in engineering activities({authors’ own reference masked}; Kotyz-Schwartz, 2010).This paper will discuss the development of a four-year sequence of project-based courses onengineering design and practice at a mid-size Canadian university. The course sequence wasdeveloped over the past two years by a committee consisting of faculty representatives from allengineering programs in the faculty of engineering, a student society representative,administrators, and invited experts. The curriculum development followed generally acceptedpractice (Wolf, 2007). The course sequence is being delivered to first year engineering studentsfor the first time in the 2010-2011 academic year and will continue rolling out over the next threeyears.The four-year sequence is a core requirement for all engineering students, and will developcompetence in design process methods and tools, problem analysis, creativity, economics andentrepreneurship, engineering communications, professionalism, and ethics. The sequence wasdesigned to meet requirements of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board graduateattributes (Engineers Canada, 2009), which addresses requirements of the Washington Accord(International Engineering Alliance, 2009). They also target applicable elements of the CDIOsyllabus.The paper will discuss the process involved in creating the sequence, the course objectives anddelivery for each year of the program, and proposed assessment and evaluation methods. Thesequence will also be compared to previously published engineering design and practicesequences. The outcomes of the first year, including student feedback and attribute assessment,will also be discussed. Upper year students who will not experience the engineering design andpractice sequence are being assessed on understanding of design method to provide baseline datafor comparison with students in who go through the sequence in future years.ReferencesCrawley, E et al., Rethinking Engineering Education: The CDIO Approach, Springer, New York, 2007.Engineers Canada / Ingénieurs Canada (2009), Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board: Accreditation Criteriaand Procedures / Bureau canadien d’agrément des programmes de génie: Normes et procédures d’agrément, 2009,accessed online October 7, 2010 athttp://www.engineerscanada.ca/e/files/Accreditation_Criteria_Procedures_2009.pdfInternational Engineering Alliance (2009), Graduate Attributes and Professional Competencies Paper, Version 2 - 18June 2009. Accessed online October 7, 2010 at http://www.washingtonaccord.org/IEA-Grad-Attr-Prof-Competencies-v2.pdfKotys-Schwartz, D. et al. (2010), “First year and capstone design projects: Is the bookend curriculum approacheffective for skill gain?”, ASEE Annual Conference 2010.Sheppard, S. et al. (2008), “Educating Engineers: Designing for the Future of the Field”, Jossey-Bass.Wolf, P. and Christensen Hughes, J. (eds.) (2007), Curriculum Development in Higher Education: Faculty-DrivenProcesses & Practices. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Jossey-Bass Publishers. Available online at:http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117869107/issue
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".